The Birth of Holosync and Brainwave Entrainment

Mind entrainment has its roots in the brain sciences established at the start of the last century, but the idea of becoming your own neuro-programmer — using a brainwave program to increase your mind power — is quite recent. It can be traced back to Gerald Oster’s 1973 article (‘Auditory Beats in the Brain’), which prepared the ground for an entire brain entrainment software industry.

To understand binaural beats, you first have to understand beat notes.

Beat notes are a special case of harmony. Normally, when two or more notes are played at the same time, we hear a chord. But, if the two source notes are very close in pitch, we hear instead a single note — a ‘beat note’ — produced by the interaction of the two soundwaves. The beat note beats or throbs at a rate given by the difference between the two frequencies. If you listen carefully when a guitarist is tuning up, you can often hear beat notes when pairs of strings are almost — not quite — in tune.

But what happens if you hear the two source sounds through headphones, one in each earpiece? When Heinnrich Dove first tried that, way back in 1839, he found that most listeners still heard a beat — but that these binaural beats existed only in their heads, being inaudible to everyone else!

In the next century-and-a-half, various researchers would experiment with binaural beats — but most saw them only as a psychological curiosity, a kind of optical illusion of the ear. Oster however, recognized enormous possibilities in the field of mind entrainment. He noted that particular kinds of patient — those with Parkinson’s disease, for instance — couldn’t hear binaural beats, and he speculated that the effort the brain had to make to combine inputs might be helping its two divided hemispheres to co-operate.

This insight was developed by Robert Monroe, who patented a binaural technology called ‘Hemi-Sync’ and went on to found the Monroe Institute to further research in the area of out-of-body-experiences and brainwave meditation. The many CDs in the Hemi-Sync brainwave program are available to this day.

Meanwhile, newer companies have sprung up to take advantage of developments in the rapidly-growing science of mind entrainment. It began in the mid-80s when Bill Harris and his Centerpointe Institute first offered their Holosync program, which contained brainwave meditations intended to increase your mind power, release stress and equip you for everyday life.

Today, the increasing sophistication of brain entrainment software has led to the development of products like Transparent Corp’s Neuro-Programmer and Mind WorkStation, which integrate mind entrainment with self-hypnosis and biofeedback. It’s even possible to buy a ‘Mind Stereo’ system which can seamlessly integrate binaural beats and other brainwave programming materials into your radio and CD listening!

The real cutting edge, however, is in the combination of binaural beats with monaural and isochronic tones. That’s mind entrainment that works with your brain in all its complexity, and it’s the kind of deep stimulation you find in up-to-date brainwave programs like the Brain Evolution System.